Neera Tanden and the era of bad faith. By Matthew Yglesias

Neera Tanden and the era of bad faith

I’ve known Neera Tanden for years, and while we’re not best friends or anything I do like her a lot, so I’ll admit I’m not fully objective on this question. But it really bums me out that her nomination for OMB Director is being jeopardized by the fact that she’s feisty on Twitter.

For starters, I’m feisty on Twitter and we need poster solidarity!

But in all seriousness, I think the last thing D.C. needs is more incentives for people to act like boring careerists. I know a lot of people on the left are mad that Bernie Twitter became the target of her ire at times, but fundamentally in her work at the Center for American Progress (CAP), she has done an enormous amount to bring progressive ideas like sectoral bargaining closer to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Something like the CAP Medicare Extra for All plan is well to the left of Biden’s health care proposals, yet reflects attentiveness to establishment Democrats’ political concerns. If you’re interested in advancing progressive policy rather than just personally avenging Matt Bruenig, you are very likely to be better off with Tanden than with a replacement-level OMB Director.

Beyond that, Republicans who backed Trump now complaining that her tweets were too mean is just too absurd to countenance. And I think that refusing to give into bad-faith nonsense is a pretty important principle to uphold.

But for precisely that reason, I fear Joe Manchin’s stated opposition to her confirmation probably dooms her. Mathematically, she needs a couple of GOP votes to be confirmed. And while I bet plenty of Republicans would vote for her if she was set to be confirmed anyway, the temptation to own the libs by blocking her now that that’s on the table is going to be too sweet.

Joe Manchin’s calculus

The decisive swing here came from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who came out against Tanden late last week. Since Manchin represents West Virginia and is relatively conservative for a Democrat, he naturally voted for lots of Trump nominees, most of whom are clearly worse than Tanden.

This, in turn, has prompted some questions about Manchin as a hypocrite:

Or even a racist:

I think if we are minimally adult for a second, we can see Manchin’s logic pretty clearly.

He represents West Virginia in the United States Senate, so he needs to break with his party a fair amount to have a reputation as a guy who breaks with his party a fair amount. Casting “yes” votes in favor of a bunch of Trump nominees who’d be confirmed with or without his vote is absolutely the lowest-cost-possible way you could do that.

Breaking with Biden in a 51-50 Senate, by contrast, is always going to be hard because the votes tend to be consequential.

But Tanden makes a good sacrificial lamb for several reasons. One is because the issue of behaving disrespectfully to Republicans really does matter in West Virginia, where the median voter is a Republican. It’s true that Manchin has not upheld a content-neutral doctrine of civility here, but that’s the point — he needs to worry about upsetting Republicans. Then, Tanden is a particularly good sacrificial lamb because the Angry Internet Leftists hate her too, so Manchin gets to actually win points with the segment of the party that is most ideologically distant from him. Tanden herself is a smart political pragmatist who’ll tell you how lucky Democrats are to have Manchin holding down that seat.

Last but by no means least, the actual policy stakes here are low. The Biden White House is undoubtedly not thrilled to be having this headache. But at the end of the day, however it’s resolved, we’re not going to look back on this as a legacy-defining moment.

The White House calculus

It does seem like there are two big issues weighing on the White House as they think about this that explain why they don’t want to just take Manchin’s “no” as definitive.

One is that Biden does not have any Asian-Americans in his core cabinet. Katherine Tsai at the Office of U.S. Trade Representative has “cabinet rank,” but nobody cares about USTR, especially since it seems unlikely that a big new trade deal is going to be negotiated any time soon.

By contrast, OMB Director not only has “cabinet rank,” but it’s legitimately one of the most important jobs in the whole government. The key thing about it is that “management” and “budget” are not really discrete areas of policy. Every agency has a budget. Every policy decision relates to the management of the public sector. OMB institutionally has visibility into basically everything that happens. And while there’s no guarantee that the president will actually care what the OMB Director thinks, it’s at least potentially a job with vast and wide-ranging power. And while I am sure there are other Asian people who’d do an excellent job in this position, I am not aware of any who are currently on the radar for this job or one of comparable prominence.

The other factor is that while Biden is definitely from the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, a defining ethos of this administration is impatience with Republican bullshit.

The Biden team’s takeaway from the 2009 experience was that they shouldn’t get suckered into a Lucy-and-the-football situation with Senate Republicans over the COVID-19 relief bill, so they’re going it alone. In this case, to an extent, the vote count just is what it is. If they have to knuckle-under, they’ll be forced to do so. But it’s actually a little weird that OMB Director requires Senate confirmation in the first place. It’s a White House job rather than an agency job, and comparable positions like Chief of Staff and National Security Advisor are not subject to Senate confirmation. Most likely they will come up with some other kind of senior advisory role for her, and then pick another OMB Director.

Neera Tanden vs the left

This video from Krystal Ball gives you a good flavor of the full scope of the Online Left’s beefs with Tanden, which I think reflect a basically misguided perspective.

I don’t want to get too deep into this because it involves a lot of people I know personally and things that have been said to me in a non-journalistic capacity.

But if you roll back the tape to when I worked at ThinkProgress, the editor there was Faiz Shakir, and he reported up through Jennifer Palmieri to John Podesta, who was the head of the Center for American Progress. CAP was always positioned ideologically slightly to the left of the Obama administration, and therefore a healthy click or two to the left of the more conservative wing of the congressional party which, at that time, was quite a bit larger and more conservative than it is today. The staff at ThinkProgress was probably to the left of the institution in terms of our personal politics, and this sometimes created some frictions. But TP also had a degree of independence, and I think Podesta liked Shakir a lot and kind of enjoyed the fact that he annoyed some people.

When Podesta stepped down to go work in the White House and Tanden took over, the tension between a bunch of TP staffers who wanted to be way to the left of the Democratic Party’s center and an institution that was trying to be just a bit to its left just got to be too much. I left rather quickly around this time, and manage to be on good terms with everyone involved. But for a lot of relevant people, instead of a quick breakup based on good faith disagreement, it became a lot of long, drawn-out intra-office fighting — much of which then leaked on the internet as part of a Russia-directed computer crime aimed at helping Donald Trump win the election.

I think Tanden’s view (which I endorse) is that both computer crimes and electing Donald Trump are bad. But some of the people who were on the other side of that dispute enjoyed taking advantage of WikiLeaks to embarrass their former adversary, somewhat losing sight of the big picture stakes in American politics. The upshot of this has been that people who are Extremely Online and whose engagement in politics doesn’t date back more than five years or so have let other people’s intra-office disputes cast her as the big villain in intra-party struggles. But whatever the stakes of the OMB nomination are, there’s no universe I see in which this ends with someone way more left-wing getting the job.

America’s Next Top Budget Director

The two most popular names to fill in if Tanden is unconfirmed are Ann O’Leary, who until very recently was Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff in California, and Gene Sperling, who was National Economic Council director under Bill Clinton and then again under Barack Obama. O’Leary was also a leading figure in the ended-up-not-happening Hillary Clinton transition.

Obviously, under Newsom, she was involved with all kinds of issues. But her main focus in her career has been on child and family policy stuff — parental leave, child care, etc. — which is what she highlighted in her resignation letter to Newsom.

Republicans have made it clear that they would like to make west coast elementary school closures the focus of national political attention, and obviously putting Newsom’s chief of staff up on the Hill for confirmation hearings would be a good way to accomplish that. I know some Democrats are cool on her for that reason, though it’s not clear to me if the White House shares those concerns.

Sperling was basically the left-wing of economic policy in the Clinton administration, and like most Democrats, his views have broadly evolved to the left since that time. He also writes big picture books, so you can really tell what he thinks. His 2005 work “The Pro-Growth Progressive” is sort of a manifesto for humane, welfare-state neoliberalism and while probably dated in various ways, I loved it 15 years ago. His newest book, “Economic Dignity,” is great and speaks directly to the questions around full employment and budget policy that will be directly in the OMB wheelhouse.

Last and perhaps most likely, Shalanda Young has already been tapped to serve as OMB Deputy Director, so she’d be a natural to step up and fill the void. She was staff director of the House Appropriations Committee before being picked for the OMB role, so people in Congress like her and the Congressional Black Caucus seems to have decided to start quietly championing her cause. She has never tweeted and does not really have any clear public profile. She’d also be on the younger and less experienced side for an OMB Director, but that was also the case for the most recent person to serve there, Russell Vought. As far as I can tell, people think she’d be a shoo-in for confirmation. It’s not as if the Biden administration lacks for seasoned hands, so if anything, her relative youth might be a welcome addition to a team that’s on the old side.

Finally, it’s worth saying that many important staff roles at OMB have already gone to some strikingly progressive choices like Sharon Block, Michael Linden, and Topher Spiro. This is a group that’s pretty firmly anchored on the progressive side of the Democratic Party coalition, which is a contrast from Obama’s first term, when I’d say OMB Director Peter Orszag and OIRA chief Cass Sunstein were probably the most conservative members of Obama’s economic team.

The price of bad faith

To make a long story short, there are lots of good choices here. Tanden is not like a “budget wonk” per se, so if she ends up doing something else in the White House, that’s not a tragedy. And I really do get Manchin’s politics here.

Nonetheless, I think giving into bad-faith nonsense from Senate Republicans is bad.

And we know that’s what this is — there’s no way the “I didn’t see the tweet” crowd can turn around after four years of Trump and claim to have a principled objection to the idea of a person mixing it up on Twitter. That’s just absurd.

The reason it’s bad to give into that isn’t that everything ought to be a partisan steamroller. It’s precisely because if you want to have bipartisan legislating, you need people to say things that they mean. If a Democrat puts an idea on the table and then a Republican articulates sincere objections to it, you can sit down and start to talk about addressing those objections. Alternatively, the Republicans might admit that their objections, while genuine, are simply not that strongly held. In that case, it might be possible to do a horse trade — an idea Democrats love (and Republicans are cool on) paired with an idea the GOP loves (but that Democrats are cool on).

But you can’t address bad faith objections, and you can’t horse trade if everyone is constantly turning the outrage dial up to 11 over things that they’re actually only mildly skeptical of. The way to make progress on immigration, or climate, or poverty, or whatever else is to get an honest dialogue going (probably behind closed doors), and the whole Tanden situation has been the 180° opposite of that. If Biden can round up a handful of Republican votes from people willing to admit that “don’t be a jerk on Twitter” is not a genuine line in the sand, that would be an excellent precedent.